Between the Soul and the Body: The Construction of Sexual Difference in Modern Spain

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the complex construction of sexual difference in Spain during the eighteenth and at the turn of the nineteenth century. Accordingly, a combined analysis is performed on the religious discourse of traditionalist Catholicism and that of the country's Enlightenment currents, plus their evolution, for they were the main perspectives from which the models of femininity and masculinity were constructed at the time. The intention is to demonstrate that the conceptualization of sexual difference in the transition to modernity was a convoluted process in which, notwithstanding the fact that they involved a key change in the way of understanding the body, gender and the relationship between the sexes, the Enlightenment's visions did not replace anti-modern religious discourses. Quite to the contrary, it is contended here that those models coexisted precariously in the protracted dissolution of the old, absolutist regime, which requires examining them under a relational prism.